Still Life With Shape-Shifter
Page 34
We share the night in a silence broken only by our occasional rustling motions and the sounds of Ann’s breathing. Which slows, then slows again, and then finally stops. When the sun comes up, it is so blond and brilliant that it hurts my eyes. Or maybe my eyes hurt because I can’t stop crying.
* * *
I spend a month grieving and a day deciding I’m going to change my life.
“Let’s do it,” I say to Brody over dinner one night. It’s late November, a week past Thanksgiving, and only gaudy Christmas stands off in the future to paint color and hope into a world of gray shadows and endlessly threatening skies.
He sets down a forkful of mashed potatoes and regards me steadily. “Do what?” he asks.
“Move to Africa. Work at that school you’re always talking about. What’s it called? Faraja. You can write your book about do-gooders. And I’ll—do whatever they want. They must need cooks or housekeepers or something.”
“This is awfully sudden.”
I shake my head. “No. You’ve been thinking about it for a year.”
“Yes, and you’ve been thinking about it for five minutes.”
“Longer than that. Let’s do it.”
“It’s an awfully big change,” he warns. “You’d have to get—I don’t know—malaria shots. And work visas. And, who knows? International security clearance.”
“Okay,” I say, nodding. “Let’s get started.”
“Melanie—”
“I want to do something. I want to feel something. I can’t just sit here and mourn for the rest of my life. You’ve spent the last year and a half living my life, so let’s spend a year living your life. I might hate it. I might love it. But it will get me away from here, and it will give you a chance to do something really important to you. It’s a win-win.”
“You know it will cost a fortune.”
“Hey, I’ve seen your bank account. You’ve got plenty squirreled away, and God knows I do. We can afford to take a year off.” I tick off additional points on my fingers. “We don’t have a house to sell. Neither of us has a job we’d be sorry to leave behind—I mean, Debbie will be sad to lose me, but I think she’d be the first one to push me out the door. We don’t have kids. We don’t have sick parents. We don’t have anything preventing us from simply picking up stakes and going wherever we want.”
He’s starting to show a little excitement—tempered with caution in case I suddenly reverse course. “It would be a good time in our lives to go off on an adventure.”
“So let’s do it,” I say again.
He stretches a hand to me across the table, and I push aside the bowl of mashed potatoes so I can reach for him. “Melanie,” he says. “Are you sure?”
“The only thing in my life I’ve ever been sure of is marrying you,” I tell him. “Everything else has always been a gamble. But I want to do it.”
He squeezes my fingers, hard, and his smile grows wide. “Then let’s go to Africa.”
* * *
It’s weeks before we’re ready to depart. Brody wasn’t wrong about the shots and the visas and the extensive red tape, and then of course we have plenty of other details to take care of, from packing and storing our belongings to saying good-bye to friends and family. Some people think we’re insane, others think we’re heroic, but the ones who love us best are happy to see us go. Because they know all the reasons we want to leave.
We’re only three days from departing when I receive a bulky package in the mail from Dr. Kassebaum. I’ve had a day of extended lunacy, so I don’t have time to open it before Brody comes home in the evening, bearing pizza and Coke. We’ve completely cleaned out the refrigerator and the pantry, so we’ve been living on takeout and fast food for the past week.
“What did Dr. Kassebaum send you?” he asks as he gets out the paper plates.
“I don’t know. Haven’t opened it yet.”
“She knows about Ann, right? I mean, you told her?”
I nod. I’d sent her a note a few days after the funeral, giving her the news and thanking her for all her help. Her reply had been brief almost to the point of rudeness, and at the time I’d wondered if I’d offended her in some way. But now I’m thinking there was something else going on in her life just then, and maybe this package will explain what.
Brody picks up the envelope and hefts it, as if from weight and size he’ll be able to determine what’s inside. “Huh. Feels like a lot of paper. Like a—” He moves his thumb along one margin. “Like a spiral notebook, maybe. A five-hundred-sheeter.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Notes on Ann’s case, maybe?”
“Maybe. Why don’t you open it and find out?”
His three sisters beat it into his head that you don’t just read a girl’s mail or browse through her diary, so he won’t even sort through and discard the junk letters that come to the house addressed to me. Heaving an exaggerated sigh, I take the envelope from him and pull the plastic rip cord that opens up the side. Bits of gray recycled paper stuffing float down to the table, landing on the plates and the top of the pizza box.
I pull out a green notebook with a tattered cover and a few sheets of paper that appear to have ripped free of the spiral over the years of its life and been stuffed back in. Just thumbing through quickly, I get the impression that it’s a journal of sorts, written in a similar-though-evolving handwriting over hundreds of pages.
“What the hell?” Brody demands, coming around to peer over my shoulder. “Is it a diary? Is it Dr. Kassebaum’s diary?”
“Or something like that,” I say. I’m wildly curious, but I’m also starving, and I have at least five hours’ worth of chores to get done tonight before I go to bed. I flip the cover shut and slip the notebook back in the envelope. “I’ll save it to read on the plane.”
“I bet it’s juicy,” he says.
“I’m sure it’ll be interesting, whatever it is. Dr. Kassebaum’s that kind of woman.”
Brody gets out paper cups and pours two glasses of wine from a bottle that is literally the last thing in the refrigerator. “To Africa,” he says. “New beginnings, new challenges, new lives.”
“To Africa,” I say, “and to us.”
EPILOGUE
JANET
For a long time, I couldn’t decide who to give it to—this notebook where I have written down my story. My first thought, of course, was Karadel or Evan, people who would wholly understand the life I have lived and the choices I have made. But I found that I wanted to put the story into the hands of someone more like me. Someone entirely human. I wanted to try to explain the impossible tale to someone who would not at first believe it, and make that reader, finally, believe.
At first I thought that person might be Crystal. She would be shocked and astonished and perhaps horrified (and I would certainly have to change Evan’s name). But I thought she would accept the story. She knew enough about me, enough about Cooper, to understand how much we would want to be together, no matter how impassable the gulf between us seemed to be.
Then, when I met Brody Westerbrook a couple of years ago, I thought I would give the notebook to him. He could edit it, supplement it, turn it into a book. I smiled at the thought. He had wanted so much to document the existence of shape-shifters. This firsthand account by a woman who had loved one would go a long way toward winning over the doubters. Although maybe not. Most people would think my tale was fiction—would want it to be fiction, because they would not be able to bend their minds around the notion that supernatural creatures exist all around them, unnoticed and ordinary and real. But Brody would still like to read the pages, I thought.
In the end, I realized it was Melanie who needed the book the most. I know she struggled mightily with her own decision—the terrible choice she made for love. I want to be able to tell her it was the right choice. I want her to know that she bought Ann the only things that anyone is ever really willing to pay a high price for—love and time. The two things I am now willing to buy with my own life.
Karadel will give me the injection tomorrow. Cooper turned into a wolf last night, and I have already given him his own shots, the ones that will keep him in his animal state for at least six weeks. When he feels the urge to change come upon him again, he will return to the house, and Karadel will give him another set of shots—and another, and another, for as long as he has the strength to present himself at her door.
I cannot guess how long my own transformation will endure. I have no idea how long my body, unused to such stresses, will be able to sustain the wolf state. I may live only a few days or a few months, leaving a bereft Cooper behind to grieve for me. I may live another ten years. Though I don’t think so. Once Cooper is gone, whether I am wolf or human, I expect I will lose the strength to keep on living. Karadel knows that. She will not look for me to return to the house once Cooper has breathed his last.
I imagine sometimes what Crystal would say if I had decided to give her the notebook. Perhaps Melanie would ask the same questions—perhaps anybody would. “Are you crazy? Why are you throwing your life away like this?” And all I would be able to summon for a reply is, “Because I want to be with him. Because I need to be with him. Because I love him.”
There is never any other answer.
* * *
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